Nothing out there.
Alone in the twilit kitchen, slumped against the cold, grimy glass that permits the occasional ray of light and regular dose of chaos to leak in. That's me, blinking the haze from my eyes: once; twice; three times for luck. Four days since they closed the only bridge off of this god-forsaken island and left us to the wrath of Fear. They knew this was going to happen, the esteemed council of Gotham, and yet… nothing. We're caged like rats down here, left to the extraordinary and unique destruction of human despair. We are rats and we are eating each other alive. I feel their tiny clammy feet on my skin and involuntarily shiver but I can't shake them off and I'm choking on their sewage stench and bleeding from their little daggers underneath my skin and I need to pull. It. Together. I need to get back to my Oscar-winning reality so that I don't become a crazed, twitching loon like the rest of them.
So I'll tell it again: It has been four days since the screaming started and didn't stop and the world was turned upside down and had a hole punched through it. And it started smearing at the edges too, like a homeless man's pipe dream.
Breathe in. Breathe out. I must think about these sort of things so that my head does not fall off of my shoulders. It is what keeps me toeing the line between sanity and… well I don't like to imagine what's out there. Imagination has to be put on hold indefinitely, cancelled until further notice. There is nothing out there. Even this thought tickles at my suppressed imagination – surely nothing still constitutes as something. Something that watches. Waits.
And there it is. There in the dark places I catch glimpses of from the corner of my eye and turn to confront, only to have them scuttle out of sight. There in the guttural screams I hear in the streets; compositions of Fear and Darkness and Hell.
I never believed in any kind of divine providence and this… situation gives me all of the evidence I need yet I've seen him. No kind of deity or light-riddled being but Hell Himself, his ragged face a mess of shadows and cloth and maggot flesh. A scarecrow of sorts.
I can feel him a few steps behind me when I dredge up the courage to look outside of my own personal Hell. He breathes his putrid graveyard-breath down my prickling neck and whispers, like a lover, of decay and destruction and of crows picking at carrion flesh. These birds are not so terrified as they should be of my scarecrow.
My fear of them is ineffable but they're what get me. What wake me up in the night, clawing at my throat and hair and eyes. They are what pull my mind apart and I do not know where or what they came from and that… that is the worst part. The not knowing.
I feel them opening the doors with creaking hinges. All in my mind of course, but that is what makes them so deadly. The doors are marked 'do not enter' and 'warning: danger' but I push and scrabble at them and no matter how hard I try, they refuse to give even an inch. No, these doors are open to stay. And so are the birds. I can feel them prying and clawing behind my eyes; feel the clockwork of my mind catching at their feathers as it unwinds. Cogs that were so obsessively oiled, carefully ticking over for almost two decades now grind and grate each other like a cacophonous orchestra of musical saws. They wear at each other and worry their close-knit family apart.
Sometimes I remember things. Then they get torn up like so many postcards, shredded on the discordant gears of my subconscious. Yes, sometimes I remember a woman, the one that wouldn't want me cursing like a sailor: my mother. I remember all of the times that I upset her and all of the times I made her worry when I didn't answer her calls after dark and didn't kiss her at night before I went to sleep and the birds love this. They caw and jeer as I tear myself up with guilt and then they rip her away, my mother, and don't let her come back.
Sometime I argue with my brother over who ate the last packet of crisps; hold hands with my sister; pull pranks and receive the consequences; am handed my dad's ticking watch. Tick, tock. A childhood friend, my best friend, swoops high above me on a swing, matching string bracelets on our summer-browned wrists. A scrap of poetry I learnt at school: 'the centre cannot hold' and suddenly I cannot hold any of this in any longer…
I tremble and sob as I try to grasp onto anything; the next line to the poem or my friend's child-thin wrist, but it just slips away like water through my fingers. My internal struggle is a delight to the cackling birds that beat about my head. They are unrelenting. Unyielding. And I hold myself together because that is all that I can do to save myself.
A giggle escapes my cracked lips. Isn't it hilarious that the mayor or my physics teacher or my bitchy neighbour are all on this shipwreck with me? All of them and all of the power that they ever had burning as it sinks. We're all the same. Everyone that I've ever hated and has ever hated me, anyone who gave me a hard time because I didn't drink or smoke or wear the right clothes, even those who ruled over the rest of us, making up crappy schemes that never got enforced for some greater good: All. Just. As sane. As me.
When did I become so callous? So cold, pressed against the icy tiles of the kitchen floor. Somehow I have slithered from my birdy perch on the windowsill. I see that the light is fading fast over The Narrows but it has not taken on the hushed hum of people too afraid to go out after dark and the thugs that make it so, the way it used to. No, now that nightmares have become a reality in the day and in the dark it is never quiet. Not anymore.
The birds have finally ceased their flapping but I know they are not gone. Instead, someone's watch clicks from my wrist and into my head. Tick. Tock. I glance up to take it off but discover only a vacant patch of lighter skin where it used to rest. Not someone's watch, I recall, my dad's watch. But that is long gone and my dad is not here. I am all alone. Not even my fishes wanted to stay once the smoke got to them but at least they have each other, floating around the top of their bowl. I'm just on my own, mess that I am. Tangled up and slumped on the floor. Quite alone.